


Désenchantée

by lucie



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, TV!Gendry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:43:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucie/pseuds/lucie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follows bits and pieces from the TV show and the books. Gendry escapes the Red Witch and flees to the Free Cities where he runs into an old friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. All is Chaos

When she is four-and-ten she gives her maidenhead to a young sailor with dark curls and broad, powerful shoulders. She’s curious, and filled with hate, lust for blood and something she can’t name. When she sees him hanging around the docks and makes her choice, it feels like finally cutting all ties with Arya Stark. She’d been taught to treasure her maidenhead, to guard it preciously because it makes her worth something. Kingdoms rose and fell on the value of a flimsy veil of skin between a woman’s legs. 

She no longer has a care for kingdoms and lords and ladies. Her worth is her sword, her freedom, whatever she makes of it and so she gladly sheds the last part of her that would make her useful to those who might come looking. There is no pain. No barrier, no blood, and she wonders if a maidenhead is just another fantasy created for songs and knights and ladies to make women easier to sell and trade and barter under the guise of chivalry.

She doesn’t care because it feels good, she feels alive and accountable to no one.

He calls himself Loïc and he calls her name - Cat - as he spills inside of her. It’s sweaty, messy, uncomfortable and she loves every moment of it. This is what Theon and Robb raved about as boys, and it’s almost as good as fighting. The rush of white hot feeling as addicting as the vicious tug of a blade through flesh. She thinks she might be a monster, but she is only what they have made her, and feels no shame.

Afterwards, she lays beside him and basks in the pounding of her heart, the ripples of satisfaction still thrumming through her veins, and the knowledge of her own power. He slumbers and she traces his hands with her own, memorizing. Faces, she’s learned, mean nothing. 

She leaves him in the night and doesn’t look back. He is a means to an end––she’ll never be a lady now. But for the first time in her life, she’s glad to be a girl. She’d never wanted to be a boy, exactly, but there had never seemed to be any advantages in being female. Her brothers got to do everything she wanted to do, and only because of the prick between their legs. She’d resented them for it, and her own body, for not being what she wanted. How could the gods be so unfair, to gift men everything, and women nothing? 

But she is learning. There is power in being a woman, and though she doesn’t yet understand it, she feels secure in the knowledge that she will. She watches, and listens, and though she doesn’t take another man to her bed, she learns all about herself beneath the worn linens of her bedding. She wears the faces she’s given, delivers her gifts and in the process, practices her new powers: cocking her hip, just so, trailing her fingers, lightly, lightly, tilting her head to let the smooth column of her neck beckon men to their doom.

She wonders if all ladies know of these powers, if maybe her mother would’ve tried to teach her but all she sees is the silly, stupid smile on Sansa’s face, blinded by the golden boy’s shine. It should’ve been the other way around, she thinks, smiling as a young, blond lordling catches her eye. She leads him away from the crowds of the tavern, and calls him my prince as she cuts him from navel to nose. It’s a messy job, but when she pictures Joffrey’s face, it’s satisfying. He died years ago, but poison is easy, quick, and without fear. She wanted him to look in her eyes as he pissed his pants and begged for life. She wanted to show him what the weak hearts of women know of mercy as she gutted him and wore the splatters of blood with pride.

Still, she has other names on her list she must content herself with, when the time is right. 

One day the Kindly Man gives her an assignment and she goes to the dockside brothel, tracing the man with dark hair and darker eyes, his skin the color of the desert sands—a rich, orange gold. He’s from the west, she knows, with a preference for pale, delicate flowers of the east. Briefly she thinks of the auburn-haired lady who was once her sister—she’d have been perfect for this role and the face Arya has chosen is similar, soft and feminine and vulnerable. She is none of that but there is fun in pretending, and she lets herself slip into someone else. 

The man is handsome, older, and he welcomes her attention with a fond smile. Someone wants him dead and she’ll pass along the gift. He is a guarded man but even the most paranoid let down their guard for a lovely woman. They sit and drink into the early hours, and though she feels the affects of the heavy ale, she gives it no mind because she’s never been allowed to indulge before and it’s freeing. Life is going by faster and the hole where her heart used to be doesn’t ache quite so badly with the bitter taste of local swill in her mouth. 

He leads her upstairs and she fingers the dagger in her skirts but doesn’t remove it, feeling reckless and powerful. She knows even as she walks that she’ll regret this in the morning, tomorrow, whenever she remembers she’s not some little tavern girl with pale hair and a shy, muted smile but she keeps going. Putting his mouth on hers, the man pushes her against the wall and she lets him, feeling her tunic pulled free of its laces and his hands brushing against the sides of her still-budding breasts. 

It doesn’t feel as good as before but she keeps going because somewhere inside her she isn’t broken. She isn’t.

Somehow she ends up face-down on the bed. He’s pounding into her and it hurts but it’s no more than she deserves—she’s no one, it doesn’t matter. She isn’t a lady, she isn’t anyone but tonight she’s played the whore, so she’ll be a whore and it will be over soon. 

She drags the dagger across his throat when it’s done and watches the blood well in its wake, but not deep. Not deep enough to kill. He stares up at her in horror, eyes wide as his chest struggles to take in air through the sliver in his neck. She gelds him, listening to the strange gurgling as his blood and screams slowly drown him.

Before discarding her soft Sansa-face, she curls in the corner of the room and cries, aching and sore and sick. By dawn she stands and rips away the face, making her way back to the temple, gift delivered. 

_Every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better._

\-------------------------

Gendry spends a year in Pentos, keeping to himself and working in a forge where the master leaves him alone. He sleeps on the floor under a thin linen blanket and hoards the few silvers he receives, keeping them at his hip in a slim pocket he sews on his pants himself. He is no seamstress but the stitches hold and the coins stay safe on his person. 

He hates. His insides burn with it, and he hammers away at it until shapes begin to form: rage and revenge and a ruthless satisfaction in the misfortunes of others. If it makes him a monster, he thinks, good. Only monsters survive in this world. 

Sometimes at night he thinks on the wolf-girl who whispered names as she slept. He’s still too raw to even think the names on his own list but he knows one day it’ll be like hers, a morbid prayer, and maybe he will feel a little closer to her, the fierce, dead girl who tried to save him.

He wonders what she would think of him now. She always did call him stupid. He swears never to forget it again. He’s a stupid bastard boy and he knows it. 

The only comfort he has as he lies awake—scared to dream, and even more terrified to wake anew—is that by now she is with her family, her brother the king and her lady mother. They will keep her safe and she will never think on him again. Her home will be waiting for her and at least one of them will have come out of this mostly unscathed. She is a princess, after all, and a fierce one.

One day he glimpses red hair in a crowd and he grabs his hammer, coins, and takes off out of the city gates on foot. He doesn’t care where he goes or what happens, but he has a hammer and no one will touch him. It takes months, but he makes it to the sea and follows the coast, sleeping tucked against a tree, clutching his hammer and wishing he’d brought a cloak. Winter is coming even across the Narrow Sea and the nights are brisk. 

He meets pilgrims and merchants along a windswept coastal road, but they glance at his hammer and leave him be. The silvers sit unused in his pocket, and he fills his belly with whatever he can scrounge. He’s not good at hunting but the occasional animal dumb enough to cross his path ends up smashed beneath his hammer. It’s messy, but it’s meat. 

The city at the end of the road is called Braavos, and it sits, surrounded by the sea, a patchwork of tiny islands connected by bridges and canals and long, flat boats. He finds a tavern in need of strong arms to heft barrels of ale and he does it without complaint, taking the few coppers it earns and sleeps that night in the inn’s smallest chamber, tucked beside two boys who swept the floors. It’s a traveller’s town and they’re used to those passing through with nothing.

It’s a week of earning his keep before he finds a smithy. There’s an apprentice already but nails are in short supply and he can make them in his sleep. In exchange he keeps a blanket in the corner farthest from the flames. Not even the street cats stray near him. 

He becomes known in the quarter as Edric, the large, silent smith with a hammer and a rage that drives him into the night, pounding out hundreds of nails, repairing mail, flattening iron to his will. He tries to take a whore once but when she sits on his lap, he throws her across the room and is no longer allowed within its doors. 

He wishes he is just a stupid bastard boy. Instead he’s the ruined bastard of a king, with blood worth killing for.

\-------------------------

She spies him from her perch on the edge of the local butcher, her feet dangling over the edge as she nibbles a meat pie and sips from her wineskin. The tiles of the roof are warm under her and she likes to spend the afternoons up here, surveying the world and wondering who beneath her will die this day.

There is only one god, and she has made a study of his gift. 

She knows enough of loss to be surprised at his survival. Somehow, she’d been sure he was dead like all the others. People who go away don’t come back, she’s learned.

But there he is, the stupid bull boy who wanted to be a knight. He doesn’t look much different, cleaner maybe and more filled out. No longer straddling the line between boy and man, he is tall, powerful, and angry. She sees it in the set of his jaw, the clench of his fists even as he sits on the edge of the canal, gazing out at the horizon. Occasionally he’ll toss a rock into the water, watching it splash once, twice, three times, before sinking. His hair is longer, hanging nearly in his eyes, and his skin well bronzed, like the sailors she sees who spend their days in the rigging under a hot ocean sun.

For the first time in a long time, she feels a smile creep on her face without pretense. She laughs aloud, startled and happy to see him alive and well. Last she remembered, he’d be tied in the back of a cart, led away by the Red Witch. Ever since, she’s added the woman to her nightly prayer and one day she’ll see her beg for mercy as she cuts out her eyes, opens her throat, and burns the body in the fire those priests of the One-God hold so dearly.

Gendry is alive but she’ll kill the bitch anyway, for taking what was hers.

Arya would go to him but she is No One and a part of her prefers to remain forever the wild girl in his memory, who had a name and a place and a family to miss.

He’s a reminder of the past. Without conscious thought, she begins to listen to the whispers, the northern breezes that pass through the city with tales of war and blood, families and power. The Baratheon king holds the north; a golden-haired child shares the Iron Throne with his wife and mother; the last Targaryen leads her army through Dorne, having removed the threat of a false Aegon, and marches beneath the shadows of dragons. The Wall is crumbling after a thousand years, and the Night’s Watch fades in strength with each passing day. 

The end of an age, septs and priests alike whisper in their cups. Fire and ice, and Death creeping down from the North. 

For months after her arrival, she swore never to go back, having put that world behind her as she shed her name and her past but recently, with every murmur out of the Seven Kingdoms, the inevitability of her return creeps closer. After all, she has unfinished business. 

There are rumors that speak of a reckoning, building in the north, the young wolves grown fierce and vengeful––those that are left. The Bastard, the Lady, and the Cub, who’s said to be more wolf than human, now. Part of her sleeps calmer at night for it, but they don’t feel like family and she doesn’t want to know what moniker they’d have for her. She’ll never be a lady and she’s hardly a wolf anymore, doesn’t remember the bite of winter winds or the smell of ice and snow. She’s not sure she even knows how to be part of a pack. But the girl she was loved them fiercely, and that girl is always part of her, the cracked and broken foundation, and she will see them again, if only to spit in the faces of those who thought her dead and gone.

She doesn’t think about what comes after.

\-------------------------

Somehow he makes a friend. It starts with a street boy, ten or thereabouts, who reminds him of Arry, if Arry had been an urchin and a boy, not just for pretend—short, wild, filthy, and always picking fights with someone bigger. One day, Gendry steps in to save his hand from being cut off by an older boy with too much swagger in his step and a shining sword at his hip, flashy but poorly made.

For a week afterwards, the boy follows him around, showing up unexpectedly as Gendry tosses pebbles in the canal, lounging by the posts that hold the roof of the forge, chewing an apple as he watches Gendry work, sitting outside the tavern to wait each time Gendry goes for a drink.

He misses Arry all the more. But the boy’s name is Gib, and he’s a curious runt with quick hands and a cheerful grin. He doesn’t touch Gendry, or ask questions, or expect anything in return; he’s just there, and it’s a relief, sometimes, to be not alone. It’s a relief to know he doesn’t hate everyone.

He grows comfortable, beginning for forget who he is, where he’s from, becoming this Edric Storm he’s chosen instead of the Gendry Waters he was born. He spends his free time walking the streets, up and down the bridges and across the canals, learning the language, willing away his hatred and his fear. Sometimes he sits and stares out at the sea, wondering why he bothers doing anything at all. No one misses him, nor will they. He thinks on a young girl, two-and-ten the last he’d seen, who would be nearly a woman grown by now. Does she ever think back on him, he wonders. Then he prays life will be kinder to her than it has been to him.

It is only by chance he hears of the wedding. Drunken sailors recently returned from White Harbor sit around the tavern he’s in, lamenting the state of the North now that the Stark’s are all dead. He tries not to hear anymore but his feet won’t move and the words reach his ears regardless.

Betrayal. A massacre and desecration of the bodies, years ago. An impostor and her cruel husband, put to the sword by his own blood-uncle. The bastard son who may or may not live; the older sister, reappeared after years in hiding, with a husband and his army; the youngest, still only a boy, a savage ghost who haunts the north with his howls and a ruthless direwolf. Arya, they all agree, is long dead. Dead with her father and mother and brothers. Dead and defiled because little girls don’t last long in war.

He tries not to think what a group of soldiers will do to a young girl’s body, but it’s useless. Men are cruel, and the gods cheer on the slaughter. Only monsters thrive in this world.

He spends the night at the anvil, pounding out a long, thin sword that will never be wielded. At dawn, he sleeps and dreams of leeches, blood, a mop of brown hair and steely eyes, and the mournful howling of direwolves.

The first time he sees her, strolling through the docks like she belongs even as her bearing is that of a lady, through and through, he thinks he’s back to dreaming. He waits for something bad to happen. When nothing does, he slips back into the shadows, watching her avoid puddles of human waste on the stone walkway. She’s everything and nothing like he would’ve expected: medium height and slim, toned and graceful with enough curves to look like a girl regardless of what she wears. Her hair is long and dark, pulled in a braid over her shoulder, and her skin is as dark as his, dyed by the eastern sun. He wants to deny it’s her but he can’t—there’s no mistaking that face and those eyes and that scowl. He wonders if she’s changed as much on the inside as she has on the outside.

She’s called Cat of the Canals, he discovers, and she’s been hanging around the city for years. No one knows where she comes from but she’s respected, feared. The sailors aspire to catch her eye, and the urchins know to wait for her to pass; she always tosses a handful of coins in their direction. He thinks that only a true lady would be so careless with good hard coin, and smiles to himself because for the first time in a long while, something good has happened. Arya Stark is alive and he wonders if she survived just to be contrary.

One morning she’s sitting on the bench in the forge when he wakes, watching him with cool eyes and absolutely nothing on her face. He used to know her every expression but now she’s distant, cold, and somehow lethal. She doesn’t move when he sees her, but he knows if she wants, he will be dead in seconds. There was always an edge to her but now it’s honed to a fine, deadly blade. 

“Arya,” he says for lack of anything else. “You’re alive,” but looking closely, he’s not so sure. She’s like a statue, perfectly still and composed, no longer the bundle of furious energy he remembers. 

“You’ve been asking about me,” she says, and it sounds like a threat, “I’m glad you’re alive but I’ll gut you myself if you give me away.”

“I didn’t then, I won’t now.” She doesn’t trust him anymore. He’s not sure he’s capable of trust, but if there’s anyone in the world he could try for, it would be her. “I heard you were dead.”

“They call you Edric,” she says, ignoring him as she’s always done. It’s almost comforting in its familiarity. “Why?”

He shrugs. He knows what it’s like to have a secret now, and he wants to tell her but she isn’t the girl he knew and he’s not that boy. Secrets are better left buried. He’s not sure he could explain, anyway. He only knows so many words and none of them feel like the right ones.

“I’m Cat,” she says, “Or any other name you like. But not Arya.”

The sound of her own name seems to startle her, and she takes off, leaping to a balcony and then to the roof, then disappearing into the glare of the sun.

\--------------------------

She looks in a mirror for the first time in four years and sees herself. She sees herself and her dead father, her dead brothers, and her lady mother. She never thought she looked like her mother at all but suddenly she is there in the slope of her cheek, in the arch of a brow and the delicate purse of lips. Her cool grey eyes and the dark curls falling over her shoulders are all Stark. The stubborn set of her chin and the height of her cheekbones are chiseled from the cold north, the shape of her face somehow lupine and girl at once. She knows no matter how far she runs, she will never be no one. 

She dons her tunic and breeches, slides her few possessions—a dagger of hard iron and rough-hewn leather grip, a spare tunic, and the coin Jaqen had given a girl long ago—into the purse at her hip. It’s odd to think of a time when she knew naught but woolen gowns and woven tapestries, wood-paneled castle walls and the soft sleep of featherbeds and wolf-furs. 

The forge where he lives and works is far from her usual quarter but by now she knows the way by heart. It’s out in the open, a roof over head supported by posts but no walls to let the air flow in the Braavosi heat. A small corner boasts half of a stone wall, or what remains of one, and a pallet of blankets and straw just beside it where he sleeps. She’s only approached him once, but she hangs around, curiosity driving her and along with a strange pull she can’t explain or chase away. 

He’s bent over the fire, stirring the coals, and a young boy sits on a nearby bench, feet folded under him, a chunk of driftwood in his hands that he hacks at with a short blade. She thinks of Harrenhal, and watching him work when she was but a girl. He’s a handsome man, and she imagines what it would be like to feel him over her, his weight pressing her into the ground, his hands large and slightly clumsy. She’s never thought of him like that before, but it’s pleasant and sends jolts of excitement through her lower belly. She hasn’t felt desire since the man in the tavern and it’s a welcome rush. She isn’t broken.

She follows him from the roofs, through his daily routine, and when he sits down at the inn to dine, she finally sets foot on the ground, taking the seat across from him. He looks up but doesn’t say anything. They share a meal in silence.

The ale is warm but fresh and she nurses the single mug she’s been served, having learned that lesson well and true. She’s forgotten what it’s like to exist as herself; she doesn’t know what to do or say if she isn’t playing a part but he doesn’t seem to mind. He never did. 

“You’re different,” she says, breaking the silence because her patience has always been less than his.

“So are you.”

They say no more.

She goes back to the temple and he to his forge. The Kindly Man gives her a new assignment, one that takes her out of her usual neighborhoods. Normally she frequents the taverns of lordlings and merchants, the whores made up fresh each day, their hair shining. This time the gift goes to a young whore, pregnant and alone, in the Braavosi equivalent of Flea Bottom, known only as the Muck. It’s filthy and crowded and sinking into the water.

“What has she done?” she wants to ask. She doesn’t, just nods and takes off from the temple. It’s not the first time she’s killed young women, and it won’t be the last but she wonders if it counts as two with the baby growing inside her. She wonders who the father is and if it makes a difference. Likely he’s the one who wants the deed done. It shouldn’t matter to her but it does. 

She will always be a little bit Arya, she’s realizing. Whether through sheer stubbornness or pride, there is always a wolf inside, waiting to be let out. One day she knows it will break free but for now it hides, licking its wounds and learning to survive without a pack. Wolves care about justice and honor but for now she is Faceless, and she can care for neither. 

The girl works in a tavern in the city’s underbelly, filled with dock workers, deckhands, and fishermen. The women are painted too brightly, their hair powdered to cover dirt and grease, and most don’t bother wearing much of anything. This doomed girl has a roundness to her, bright cheeks and a soft mouth, delicate golden hair that would curl if it isn’t matted down. She smiles and treats with a young man, leading him up to her room where he grunts and sweats, pays and leaves.

Arya watches from the rooftop across the narrow canal, the weight of her iron dagger tucked in the belt about her waist a solid reminder of who she isn’t and why she’s there. Leaping across to the open window, she makes her way inside, dropping to the floor and brandishing the dagger, prepared to strike.

The girl watches her from the bed of straw she lays upon. No gasps of surprise, shrieks of indignity, pleas or protestations. Arya kneels beside her and still the whore doesn’t move except to follow with her eyes, bright green in the moonlight. 

“You’re beautiful,” the girl whispers, reaching up a hand to brush fingers across Arya’s cheek. Stunned and bewildered, but not threatened, Arya lets her trace the lines of her eyes, the shape of her nose and mouth. The whore’s face blooms into a smile, and she looks all the lovelier for it. “Glad it’s you,” she continues, “I want to see something lovely as I die.”

“You know why I’m here,” Arya says, which she knows is a stupid statement with the dagger poised to strike. It’s a new twist on her mission and she doesn’t know quite what to do with it yet. A lesson to be learned.

She’s never been called beautiful before and it’s unnerving. She’s certain the girl is mad, so happy and content and unafraid.

“Better you than them,” the girl says. “You will do it, won’t you?” The look in her eyes is almost hopeful. “I just don’t want to hurt, is all. I want to go quick.”

Arya cocks her head and stifles a million questions she wants to ask. “I can be quick,” she says instead. But she makes no move to deliver the gift just yet. It feels unfinished, not yet time, so she waits.

“At first it didn’t seem so bad,” the girl whispers, talking mostly to herself, “It paid good coin and I thought it’d only be for a little while. Just a little while. The men weren’t unkind and I‘d a bed. A real bed. No featherbed, but better ‘n I ever dreamed. I didn’ mean to go on like this. I drank the tea and I did what I was told and I got a baby in my belly. I’ll lose this room soon when no one else will have me. I’ll be out on the streets and he’ll find me and he’ll cut out this baby and he’ll make it hurt, he will.”

“Who is he?” Arya wanted to know. She felt a weird distance from the scene, as if someone else were about to kill the girl and someone else hovered over her, listening.

The girl smiled, eyes hazy. “It don’t matter. I’m no good in this world. I’m just a girl and everything’s so hard. I got no one. No one to love me, to love my baby.”

“It will be quick and painless,” Arya promised, leaning down. She placed a hand on the girl’s cheek, a gentle kiss on her lips, and when she raised herself from the bed, the girl was dead. 

Her dagger hit swift and true, direct to the heart. There’s very little blood and when she pulls the girl’s eyes closed, she almost looks peaceful.

She feels a strange weight in her chest. It’s been a long time since she’s felt remorse; it’s almost foreign. But she’s more and more sure that’s what this is. For a moment she’s not sure she can even breathe. She’s done her job, done what was asked, knows it’s a kinder fate for both girl and child, and yet suddenly her lungs can’t take any air and the room is stifling, hot, stinking of human sweat and filth and her own guilt. 

Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s up on the rooftops of the city, hopping from one to the other, down the main canal to the forge. Gendry is there, working, heating and mixing metals, not sleeping like normal people at this time of night. She swings down into the forge and he drops a hot poker too close to his toes, swearing. She lungs for him, burying her face in his filthy leather smock, trying to feel like the little girl she’ll never be again and lose herself inside of his arms until she’s Arya again and none of this will have ever happened. 

He shoves her back and because she isn’t expecting it, she goes tumbling to the ground, next to the furnace, knocking her head against its stone foundation. Her breaths are coming faster now, nothing seeming to reach her aching lungs, and she’s horrified to hear the halting sounds coming from her mouth with every attempt to breathe. He looks stricken once he realizes what he’s done, and he reaches for her, hesitantly, but she dashes up and away. 

Ignoring the pain in her head and her hand, she takes off down the narrow streets, twisting and turning to lose him in case of pursuit. She can’t imagine why he’d follow, not after everything, not when they’re strangers and she’s a fool for having been there at all. This must be what going mad feels like, and she thinks if she stops, she might literally fall to the ground in pieces. Sharp little shards of a girl who doesn’t even know her own name.

“Arya!” he calls out behind her, and she wants to strangle him, tell him that’s not who she is, to be careful with that name. It means something, she’s just not sure what.

She runs until she reaches the mainland, then the walls of the city, and turns left, following it along. She can’t go back to the temple, not like this, and she’s got nowhere else to go. So she runs until she can’t, and then she stumbles, and then she crawls to an alley and tucks herself against the wall. If she couldn’t breathe before, she definitely can’t now, and the world is starting to spin. She’s still making those sounds, louder and shuddering, something she’d call crying if there were tears but her eyes are dry.

Arya the girl would scoff, laugh at her now, dirty and sobbing in the streets. She was stronger as a child, she thinks, stronger and more resilient. But Arya didn’t understand. She didn’t know the world or what she was doing, she only wanted not to die.

She thinks of her father for the first time in many years. What would he think of her now, if the dead could see. Would he be ashamed that she’d tossed aside all honor, family, everything he’d taught her for the sake of her hatred and revenge? She feels, for the first time, the weight of blood on her hands, the smear of it on her clothes, her hair, her skin. It’ll never wash out. She’s covered in blood and for what? Her enemies still live, across the sea, some thrive while she hunts someone else’s prey.

No more, she thinks, her sobbing turned to coughs. She’ll finish her list. She’ll return her brother to his rightful place as Lord of Winterfell, and she’ll protect those who are left in her small, shattered family. She won’t be one of them, not now after everything, but she’ll make sure they survive. She’ll ensure the Lannisters and those who tried to eradicate them fail. Then she’ll disappear. She’ll lose her face for good and her family will finally be able to properly mourn Arya Stark.

\------------------------

He finds her just after dawn. He’s out of breath and without his hammer—the first time he’s been without one since his escape from Dragonstone four years ago—but all he can think about is the look on her face as she’d fallen. Shock and hurt and a devastation he didn’t think her capable of. She’d been fine a few hours ago, her usual silent, shadowy self as they sipped ale and stuffed themselves with stew. He couldn’t think what had happened to make her run to him, fighting back her sobs and reaching for a hug. A hug. Arya. 

He’d reacted instinctively to the feel of arms around him, a body against his own. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined her coming to him and reaching out, needing comfort.

She’s laying on her side, curled against the wall, arms around her knees. Quiet now, but still alert, she blinks up at him. She looks like she did as a girl, wide-eyed and determined. He can almost pretend that no time has passed, that they are children on the run from the Gold Cloaks. But he can see the burns on the palm of her hand where she tried to stop her fall against the furnace. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. He didn’t mean to push her away but he can’t help it. He didn’t mean to hurt her. He never ever wanted to end up here, but nothing ever goes the way he wants.

She doesn’t respond, just closes her eyes and presses her face into her knees, every muscle tense and tight as she tries to curl in on herself.

“What happened? Are you okay?” He knows even as he asks that she won’t answer. Kneeling down beside her, he reaches out a hand and places it on her shoulder, lightly. It’s the first time he’s reached out to someone since Dragonstone. She is solid, real, trembling beneath his hand. 

He doesn’t know what to do so he drops his butt to the ground and scoots beside her, back against the wall. The city will be waking soon and if she has a home, an occupation, a life outside of this alley they will notice her missing. The fire in the forge will have burned low by now, without someone to tend it, and the master would be arriving soon, wondering where he’d gone. Still, he stays where he is, one hand resting on Arya’s shoulder as she huddles against the wall and his side. He doesn’t remember her moving, but her head is just lightly resting against his thigh and it doesn’t bother him. Even if it did, he’s not sure he could bear to move her. She was the only one to fight for him when the witch took him away. She screamed and fought and he remembers. 

_I can be your family_ , he hears in the voice of a frightened child, trying not to cry. If he’d changed his mind about the Brotherhood then, would they still have ended up here?

After awhile, she stirs, rising up to lean against him properly, her head on his shoulder. They used to sit like this on the road when she was too tired to hold herself up, but her breasts hadn’t settled against his arm then, a pleasant softness. She’d been naught but skin and bones. Now she is nearly six-and-ten, he thinks. He has no doubt there have been boys to take an interest in her; she’s grown into her looks, a sort of sturdy elegance in her high cheekbones and angular jaw. Her eyes are exquisite, set aglow by the darkness of her skin, a smooth honey brown that wants for touching. And her lips, full and pink and delicate (it’s not a word he’s used to associating with Arya but here it fits). 

The Red Witch hasn’t ruined him from admiring women, at least, and Arya is one worth admiring.

It’s impossible to reconcile these two Aryas in his mind: Arry the orphan boy turned wild wolf-girl and this Arya, this strange and beautiful creature at his side. He’ll worry about it later, but for now he drapes an arm across her shoulders, pulling her closer and reveling in the touch of another human being that for once didn’t cause him to tense up.

Eventually she stands, tugging him along. He goes, because it’s Arya and it’s almost instinct to follow.


	2. Let my fall be slow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Arya goes, Gendry follows.

She leads him back to the forge then disappears. Gib is waiting by the entrance, feet tucked underneath him, and the apprentice smith stands over the anvil, working on a bronze breastplate. Gendry grunts a greeting a both of them, eyes still trying to follow the shadow that slips away the moment his back is turned. 

He’s finding Arya to be every bit as perplexing as she’d been as a child. For awhile there, with the Brotherhood, he’d thought he might finally have her figured out; a girl forced to grow up too fast, who’d spent more time with her brothers than sister, and resented above all things being thought vulnerable. Now he’s back to square one, and though he’s tired of not ever knowing where he stands or what he’s even around for, there’s a strange draw to her, to make sure that something he cares about, at least, comes out of this war in one piece.

They are both of them screwed by fate. But there’s something more he feels than just companionship as he thinks on her wide, haunted eyes peering up at him from the ground of the alley. 

He knows he’ll be seeing her again. She never could leave him alone for very long and that, at least, doesn’t seem to have changed.

When she shows up that night with a bag over her shoulder and Needle stuck through the loop of her belt, he can’t help but think he’ll never be rid of her now. She drops her things and a spare blanket on the ground by his measly pallet and sits, gazing up at him as he finishes putting away the day’s work. Gib comes over to join her, abandoning his bench and the driftwood he’s continuously carving, crawling up to sit beside her. He’s not sure what Arya will make of the street boy but at least she hasn’t hit him yet, even as the boy’s fingers poke the bag she carries.

“Wha’s ‘at?” Gib asks, hands appearing from nowhere with a glass vial that he tilts to see the light shine through. 

“It’s poison,” Arya says, calmly, not bothering to snatch it away from the boy, “It’ll kill you fast. If you touch anything else in that bag, I’ll kill you faster.”

There’s a certainty in her voice that shakes Gendry, although the boy is unfazed, placing the vial back where it belongs and scooting over to huddle against her. Gendry pauses what he’s doing, waiting for something he isn’t sure of, watching because he’ll separate them if needs be. The only two people in the world he actually cares about and they’re both as likely to strike first, think once the blood’s been spilt. 

“Do I look like your mum to you?” she asks but doesn’t dislodge the boy, leaning up against her breasts. Gendry feels a pang of envy and he’s not sure if it’s because he wants to be in the boy’s place, face buried in a small but soft looking bosom or because he just wants to be able to touch someone without lashing out. Probably more than a bit of both.

“Yer a girl,” Gib says. As if that explains everything, and it probably would if this were anyone but Arya. 

She rolls her eyes but lets him stay where he is, turning her attention back to Gendry with a smirk. “What are you doing here?”

“Working. It’s a forge; I’m a smith.”

“In _Braavos_ ,” she says, annoyed.

“It was at the end of the road. I walked here from Pentos,” he says. He doesn’t want to irritate her but part of him is desperate to pull out the temperamental girl from behind her newer calm facade. Driving her crazy is a game he didn’t even realize he’s missed.

Her eyebrow twitching is the only sign of her rising impatience. “Why aren’t you with the Red Bitch in Westeros?” she asks, each word tense from hanging on the edge of her fraying temper.

He barely hears the question, his mind catching on the hate in her voice when she speaks of Melisandre. It stokes the raging fire within himself and he feels it lashing out at its restraints. 

He tightens his fists and shakes his head at her. “Why aren’t you dead at the Twins with the rest of your family?” He knows he shouldn’t say it, knows it’s cruel and he didn’t ever want to be that, but he’s not the old Gendry. The hate within him is flaming anew and he slams the hammer down on the anvil, no metal between them to work, his muscles burning with fury and the need to strike, to scourge, to destroy. To hit and feel the shockwaves loosen the tension in his arms and chest.

The hammer clangs and the sparks fly and he doesn’t feel any better. He can’t look at Arya, waiting for her retaliation.

“I was at the Twins,” she says in the same voice from before, soft and calm. He can’t help looking up at her, curious how she got there, where the Brotherhood was, how she ended up here, alone. Her gaze is steady and blank, as dead as her brother and mother, as if a corpse sits and speaks not a living, breathing girl. “I stood outside the Great Hall and watched, and listened. I tried to get through the doors they’d barred shut, I had Needle and I was going to gut, at least, my share of Freys before dying beside my mother and brother and good-sister. I never met her, you know, but I saw her and the child in her belly die. I saw them take my brother’s head and I saw my mother’s throat slit and her blood spray across what remained of Robb and his lady wife. The Hound dragged me away or I’d have joined them.”

He wishes she’d have punched him instead. He doesn’t want to picture the scrawny twelve-year-old she’d been, the bright sheen of hope in her eyes as she’d spoken of her family, her king brother and lady mother, the happy reunion she’d dreamed of even if she’d never admit to it. Somehow they’ve switched places; he’s the one with barely contained fury, aching in his own skin with how much he feels and hates while she is composed, her emotions lost in the distance she keeps between herself and the world.

“I’m sorry,” he says and looks away, unable to conceal the storm inside him. He takes the hammer and pounds it against the anvil, successively harder with each stroke until the bones in his arms rattle and throb. When he can’t lift the hammer anymore, he stops, gazing down at the battered anvil, “She took me to Dragonstone. There’s power in my blood because I’m the bastard of Robert Baratheon. She wanted my blood and she took it with leeches and knives and fire until Ser Davos rescued me and sent me away. And now I’m here.”

He finally looks up at her and she’s unchanged, her eyes like hammered steel. 

“I told you I don’t like that woman,” is all she says in response. If he didn’t still ache so badly, he’d laugh because she had. He remembers and he remembers laughing at her then, thinking it was cute. The jealousy of a child for a woman grown. But she’d seen clearer than all of them, hadn’t she? Or had Thoros, Beric, Anguy—had they known what they sent him to? For a handful of gold. He supposes he should feel honored but he doesn’t. He’d rather be the Gendry who was only worth what he could make with steel and iron and the heat of a furnace.

“I’ll kill her for you,” she continues, rising from the ground and dislodging Gib who had dozed off against her. “After I’ve killed the Freys, the Lannisters, and the Boltons, I’ll hunt her down and put Needle through her eye to the hilt.”

“I’m not sure she can be killed,” he says because he knows others have tried. Others who are grown men, trained and battle-hardened and professional. She’s always been deadly, and she carries a new mercilessness he’s not used to, but for all her bravado, she’s still a girl, and so small when he really looks at her. “She’s some sort of witch and she’s got powers. She can do things, unnatural things.”

“Anyone can be killed,” she tells him. Drawing her sword, she steps closer, tilting her face up at him. “All men are made of water,” she says, sticking Needle against his belly, gently, the tip pressing into the boiled leather of his apron. “If you pierce them, the water leaks out. And they die.”

She’s close to him, her breath warm against his collar-bone, but not touching apart from the tip of her sword. She withdraws the steel, sliding it back into her belt but holding her footing, toe to toe with him, her eyes glowing like steel in the fire, right before it turns red and starts to melt. He thinks she might be as hot to the touch because he can feel her heat even with the space between them.

He’s two and twenty; he knows what this sharp sting in the depths of his belly is. His blood is stirring, pounding, and she can probably hear it, wolf-girl that she is, can probably scent his sweat as that of a prey. She is a friend and a lady and still so young, but she is dangerous in more ways than he’d ever imagined. More dangerous than Melisandre, and twice as lethal. He doesn’t doubt she will do as she says and kill the Red Witch. It should be a frightening realization but it only serves to send a bolt of desire straight to his cock. 

He is a monster, after all, and he thinks she might be too.

“I don’t think that’s water,” he finally finds his voice and tries to distract her. Set off her temper and get her away from him before he forgets that her brother was a king, her father a lord.

“ _Mures_ ,” she answers, taking a step back.

“The Braavosi word for blood.”

“It means the water of life,” she says, “Blood.”

“You’re going back, then?” he asks because it’s the only way to kill all those on her list. He’s not as stupid as she thinks. At least he isn’t when she’s not so close.

“Two of my brothers might be alive. And my sister. I’ll make sure that everyone who harmed us, betrayed us, pays for it with blood. I’ll see the Starks restored to Winterfell.”

She’s always been braver than he is. 

“And after you’ve done all that?” He’s curious though he doesn’t think too deeply on why.

She shrugs. “Dunno. Maybe I’ll find this Dragon Queen they’re all talking about. I’ve always wanted a dragon.”

“I want a dragon,” Gib pips up.

Both ignore him and Arya continues, “I leave tomorrow. There’s a ship going to White Harbor, _The Dancing Maiden._ ”

“What’s in White Harbor?”

For the first time, a true smile makes its way to her lips. “My brother.”

By nightfall, he’s convinced she means to spend the night in the forge with him, and while he’s used to her presence now and somewhat relieved to have her on hand to know she’s alright, he’s not sure what he’ll do in his sleep. The last time he’d slept close to anyone had been Anguy and Lem after he’d told her he was staying on with the Brotherhood. He’s changed since then and she’s changed since then but when she curls up in a blanket on the ground beside him, he can almost pretend it’s four years ago. She doesn’t hesitate to drift off, lightly snoring against the crackling of embers in the low-burning furnace. He’s not sure, and he doesn’t want to think it because the gods will take it away, but he thinks what he feels—this warmth in his chest, not a burning hate or rage or fury like he’s used to but soft and comforting—is home. For the first time since he left Master Mott and his little pallet in the backroom of the forge, his breath comes easy and if there’s anywhere in this world he might belong, it’s here. 

His eyes fall shut without his noticing and he doesn’t dream. 

\-----------------------

Arya wakes in the forge, to the smell of charcoal and metal and male sweat. She’s tucked herself against the old wall, pressed into the rough stones. On her other side is Gendry, sleeping half on his side, half on his stomach, his arms wrapped around his middle beneath him. His face is pressed into the straw and the dirt, his mouth hanging open, gentle snores coming from his throat. 

They aren’t tangled together in limbs and blankets like they used to be on the road, when they were younger and less guarded. His snores are the same, though, and she likes the look on his face when he’s sleeping. He’s managed to corner her against the wall, his body curved around hers, leaving a gap but still between her and the rest of the city, a hammer laying above his head within easy arm’s reach.

She wonders if he’s good with the hammer, if he can swing it at people as easily as metal. The image makes her want to wake him with a kiss, and pull him above her so his bulk presses down on her. She wants to see if he’s as strong when he’s pounding into her instead of an anvil. He couldn’t think of her as a child, then; he couldn’t call her milady and blush about his cock after he’s had it in her. What would he do if he woke to the sight of her, hand down her pants and his name on her lips? She’s tempted. Only the open air above them and the people beginning to move about the streets stay her hand.

Instead she rises, stuffing her blanket back in her bag and wrapping her belt around her waist. Gendry stirs at her feet and rolls to his back, peering up at her. He grabs his tunic and pulls it closed before sliding on his boots and standing at her side, hammer in hand.

“Where are you off to this early?” she asks him, because he’s watching her tuck Needle in its spot and sling her bag over her shoulder. He makes no move to stoke the fires, or fetch water for the forge as he should. 

“I’m going with you, if it pleases milady,” he says with a tilt of his head.

“It doesn’t please me and don’t call me milady. I don’t need your protection, idiot. I’ve done fine without you for years.”

He rolls his eyes and steps around her, leading the way out of the forge. “It’s an expression. I’m going whether you like it or not.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say what you meant in the first place?” she mutters under her breath, knowing he’ll hear as she follows. 

They reach the outermost island of Calandos before the sun has reached the top half of the sky. It is by far the largest island, and at its heart is the harbor, a network of wooden docks and stone quays crawling with deckhands, dockhands, and whores. Her first steps in this foreign world were there, and it is there she will take her last steps, leaving behind Cat of the Canals, No One, Blind Beth, and hundreds of others. _The Dancing Maiden_ is one of a handful of single-masted boats in the water; small and narrow with a single square sails, these ships are meant for speed and agility. 

“Do I have to call you Edric?” she asks, watching the sailors scramble across the yard on the ship they’re to board. “Or can I call you Gendry?” She wants to know if someone is looking for him. The name Arya Stark will garner attention but Gendry likely won’t unless he’s done something. She doesn’t know why she didn’t see it before—him being the bastard son of Robert makes sense in a strange way. Why else send the gold cloaks after a single bastard boy from Flea Bottom? He’s got the Baratheon look which she’d have recognized if she’d ever bothered imagining it was possible.

She doesn’t want to ask him about Melisandre. He nearly broke his own hammer talking about his brief time with her and she knows now what the men had appreciated about the Red Woman. There was a cruelty in the witch she recognizes in herself and doesn’t want to know what Gendry meant when he said she’d taken his blood with leeches, knives, and fire. She’s not sure why she told him about the Red Wedding but she’d never imagined he’d be as damaged as she is. Her memory of him is the man-boy who’d believed in a Brotherhood of knights, believed he could be part of them. He’d been kind and gentle and so far removed from the game of thrones and titles and deception. 

He shakes his head, the dark locks on his forehead brushing back and forth. “Call me Gendry. If they’re still looking for me, they’ll find me anyway.”

“They won’t take you again,” she says. At two-and-ten she’d been limited in her options. Now she isn’t and she’ll defend her pack, Gendry and Jon and Sansa and Rickon. No one will take them from her again, because she’s had enough of losing and being helpless to prevent it. She’d watched her father lose his head, her brother cut down beside her mother, Gendry dragged away from her in chains, heard the news of Bran and Rickon’s death at Theon Greyjoy’s hands long after the event had passed and there was nothing she could do. 

“I’ve silvers enough for both our passages but we’ll share a cabin. These ships are even smaller on the inside than they look. It’s also easier to protect you if I’m with you,” she tells him, brooking no room for argument on his part. The roll of his eyes is familiar and welcoming, though the clenching of his fists is new, it’s also satisfying. 

“I don’t need your protection,” he says, almost spitting the words. His face looks pained, so he must be thinking, but he says no more.

“Even so. One bunk is cheaper and we’ll need the coin later.” 

“You’re not a child anymore,” he responds. “Sleeping on the floor of an open-air forge is different from sharing a cabin bunk.” 

She snorts. “Your maidenhead is safe with me.”

“Seven hells, Arya! It’s not _my_ maidenhead I’m concerned for!” He turns to her then, staring her down with eyes aglow in the mid-morning light.

“If it’s mine you’re worried about, you’re a few years too late!” she shouts, half-satisfied, half-ashamed. She isn’t the child he left behind, and she isn’t the lady he thinks she is but she’s not embarrassed by the things she’s done. She’s survived and all the honor in the world hadn’t saved her father, mother, or brother.

Refusing to wait for him, she turns and makes her way across the rickety wooden ladder leading up to the ship’s deck. She’d spoken to the captain the day before, and he is expecting her. Gendry is a surprise but a few more silvers in his palm and he’s back to smiling. The captain is a small man, wiry and lean with a trimmed beard and fine hairs cropped close against the top of his head. His cheeks are red and he can smell changes in the wind, or so the rumors say. He’s respectful to her and suspicious of Gendry, but she tells him they’re to be married. The captain snorts, but he doesn’t ask more questions. 

The ship sets sail at midday. Braavos becomes part of the horizon faster than she’d thought possible, and her mind lets it go as easily as her eyes. A lovely city that taught her much but it was never home. She’d never belonged in the sand and the marshes, the warm moist air and excessive sun. The wind blows in from the north and she can almost smell the snow from here. 

The rolling and rocking of the ship doesn’t agree with her, and she finds herself huddling in the cabin, eyes closed, hands pressed to her forehead. She’s not going to be sick but her head is spinning and she’s not sure she’ll be eating a bite the whole journey. The day drags on and she’s not sure where Gendry disappeared to but at nightfall, he’s stumbling inside, slamming the thin wooden door shut behind him and sliding down to the floor. He makes no move to get up and she glares over at him, head still reeling and not in the mood to deal with him if he’s going to be trouble.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks when she doesn’t comment on his awkward, cramped seat on the floor. 

“Seasick.”

His blue eyes focus on her face, pale and sweating even in the chill of the night air that seeps into the hull. He’s quiet for a moment, then stands and hovers over her.

She shuts her eyes, pressing the heel of her hand into the bridge of her nose.

“Anything I can do?” he wants to know.

“You can shut up.”

Mercifully, he says nothing. Plopping down on the rough blankets that constitute a bunk, right next to her head, he puts one of his large hands on top of her own, pressing down gently. The pressure relieves the pain in her head and his skin is cool, refreshing against her clammy face and she can’t help the moan that escapes. He chuckles, a deep, rich sound that sends pleasant tingles down her spine.

Silence persists in a comfortable manner, and he eventually winds his free hand into her hair, brushing it out with his fingers. His hand catches in a particularly nasty tangle and he tugs a touch too hard, pulling her hair tight. She groans aloud and shifts on the bunk, rolling her head back to push into his hands.

“Fuck, keep doing that,” she tells him. She doesn’t know if it’s the jolt to her groin or the way the pressure on her scalp eases the ache in her head but whichever it is, she likes it. 

“This?” he asks, taking a handful of hair and pulling. She moans out a yes, lifts up her head, and buries her face in his thigh, her hair fanning out across his lap. The muscles in his legs tense, then relax, and she nuzzles down, pushing her forehead into the bone of his leg. Both his hands reach into her hair, raking through the strands and pausing every so often to grasp a chunk and tug and she feels herself dozing off.

\---------------

Gendry’s not sure how her face ended up in his lap. He’d spent all day out on deck, helping out where he could and chugging the foul mix of water and rum the sailors kept passing around because it kept his mind of his last conversation with the girl who’s just as temperamental as she’s always been, only better now at hiding it.

A few fucking years too late. He’s not sure what bothers him more: the horrific scenarios bouncing around in his head, filled with a young, wide-eyed girl and cruel, rough men, or the idea that she might have taken a lover by choice, some dark eyed Braavosi who could never appreciate how special she is, what her worth is as more than just a passing cunt. Even if she weren’t a lord’s daughter—a king’s sister!—she deserved better than a few quick thrusts and callused hands that don’t know her—her temper, her fire, her loyalty. 

She once said he was her pack, he and Hot Pie. It’s been years and many leagues between but he thinks it’s a fitting term; if he were a wolf like her, he’d be growling and out for blood but he’s nothing more than a boy, and a bastard one at that. He wants to protect her in spite of her strength. She’s the only friend he’s ever had, the only person to want him for himself, for being Gendry, and not a blacksmith or the bastard of a king. When the people he’d chosen for family turned him over for gold, she’d fought and screamed and gone face-to-face with one of the most dangerous women in Westeros, all for him.

At dusk, a bowl of broth is put in his hands and he eats his fill. He’s not sure where Arya has gone, but he goes down to their cabin, and she’s inside, curled on her side, face pained and eyes squeezed shut. Her cheeks are pale, almost gray, and a fine tremble works its way through her body. He wants to laugh at her—tough, resilient Arya Stark brought down by seasickness—but she’s not looking well and tells him to shut up in a pinched voice that lets him know she’s in real distress. 

When his fingers catch in her hair, he wants to apologize but she tells him to keep doing it, her voice breathy and raw, her hips shifting on the blankets. His mind stops working as her face drops in against his thighs, and even through the instinctive flinch it brings on, he finds his blood rushing south to pool in his hardened cock just beside her head. He breathes through his nose and keeps his hands moving in her hair so they don’t wander elsewhere. The curves of her back and bottom beg for his hands and her groaning sends vibrations through his lower half, and he can’t help wondering if she knows what she’s doing. 

“Are you sleeping?” he asks when she doesn’t move for awhile.

“Mmmm, mostly,” she says, turning her head so her eyes peer up at him from under her hair.

“Can I ask you something?”

She keeps looking at him, then nods once.

“Where you willing?” He has to know. If only to stop the imaginings in his mind that won’t stop playing out in nightmarish scenes. He remembers the screams of the girls in Harrenhal who’d been dragged away by the soldiers, and it’s Arya’s voice that echoes in his ears, pleading for his help. 

She blinks and closes her eyes, the relaxation on her face fading. A small half-smile tilts up her lips and she shakes her head, “Willing enough. I wasn’t raped.”

There’s an uncomfortable weight in his stomach at the thought of her in the bed of someone else but he breathes easier knowing, at least, that his imaginings are worse than reality. What willing enough means he isn’t sure, but as long as she’s not traumatized, as long as she didn’t scream and beg, he can bear it. He feels responsible for her and can’t decide if he’d have really managed to leave her if the Red Witch hadn’t come along. He doubts it.

“Did she hurt you?” Arya asks, half-asleep and voice soft.

“Yes,” he says because there isn’t any other way to answer that question. He thinks she already knows. Shame rushes to his cheeks because he’s a man, and he remembers the humiliation of feeling his hands bound, the confusion as he lay there exposed and weak. Arya would never find herself so vulnerable; she’s too smart for that, he knows. 

“I was stupid to think it would be anything else,” he whispers, mostly to himself. He hopes she’s asleep; she doesn’t need any other reason to think he needs protection. 

Lost in his own thoughts, it’s the feel of her hand, lightly callused, cupping his cheek that brings him back to himself and draws his gaze to the girl looking up at him. He can’t figure out what’s going through her mind; her eyes are as fathomless as ever. 

“I won’t hurt you,” she says as if he doesn’t already know that, and he thinks he could spend the rest of his life figuring her out. He doesn’t know what he’s done to earn her loyalty; all he did was follow her lead back on the Kingsroad, and again after Harrenhal. He'd planned to leave her and still he’s here, part of her pack, and he knows with a bone-deep certainty that she is the only person in the world he trusts.


	3. I'm looking for a soul to save me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the excessive amount of time it took me to get this out. I've moved (internationally) and it's been quite a hassle and things are just now settling down. This chapter also took me quite a bit of work, because for some reason it was very difficult to get back into the mindset. Also, I'm not entire sure where I'm taking this—probably not much further. I don't want to get involved in the whole Westeros mess (white walkers, throne, lost Starks). Mostly I wanted to reunite Gendry and Arya, and I've done that. There is one, maybe two, chapters left in this. Hopefully it will come much faster this time! I really appreciate your comments and kudos! I hope this doesn't disappoint. :)

The next morning, Arya wakes with Gendry’s head cushioned against her breasts, his arms around her waist holding her still. Tossing and turning in her sleep is one habit she hasn’t been able to break and she wonders if it bothers him, although it never used to. They fell asleep the night before, awkwardly side-by-side and pressed together where they couldn’t avoid it (which was nearly everywhere). Somewhere in the night she’d wormed her way under him, legs and arms sprawled every which way, and he’s curled around her, his knee tucked between her legs and pressing up against her.

She likes it. Even with the small pool of drool just to the right of her nipple where Gendry’s mouth hangs slightly open. 

She’s going to skin the Red Witch alive. Her dreams had been filled with fire and Gendry screaming, pleading. Something about the resentment and shame on his face when the woman is mentioned sticks with her. He used to laugh and smile and tease so easily, always quick to enjoy just existing while she tended to dwell in her thoughts and worries. He’s worth more than whatever mystical power is in his blood and she hates how this war has reduced all men to their value in gold or steel, women to the value of their cunt. She doesn’t understand why the world works the way it does, but she will play the game, if that’s what it takes to protect her family. 

Gendry is part of her family now, she decides, putting that stray thought into concrete words in her head. He came back to her when he’d been lost and that’s worth keeping. He’s kind and he’s loyal and there’s the same honor in him she remembers in her father and brothers. It is a weakness but she will protect him from it because she knows what to watch out for, knows how to defend what’s hers. He’s her pack.

But he’s definitely not her brother. Her arm tingles from his weight on top of her, pushing her shoulder blade into the uncomfortable wood of the bunk they are sharing but having him draped over her has warmed her to the core and she can feel the wetness between her legs where his knee presses against her. Sharing a bed with her brothers never felt like this; she was more likely to wake up with a black eye or a foot in her belly with Robb and Rickon so prone to wild thrashing in their sleep. Several times all five of them had huddled together in one bed—once when both their parents were out of Winterfell for several nights and the younger ones had been scared, another time when they’d all fallen asleep listening to Robb embellish some of Old Nan’s stories—and somehow they’d developed a hierarchy in their sleep. Robb, Arya, and Rickon all kicked and punched and squirmed, hogging more than their share of the large canopied bed, while Sansa and Bran curled in on themselves, staying to one side or the other, out of the fray. Jon was always careful to leave before Catelyn tucked them in, so he never ended up sleeping in the pile. She’d pitied him then, wishing she could make him welcome all on her own, but now she thinks it might have been kinder. She missed the feel of sleeping in a pile like a bunch of puppies, arms and feet and blankets and the pushing, shoving of siblings. 

Only Sansa and Rickon remain. The thought sends sharp pain through her heart and she’s surprised it still hurts to think of them. She keeps waiting to grow immune.

Gendry shifts in his sleep, tightening his hold on her. His head nuzzles down into the space between her breasts, and he mumbles, the scraggly hair on his face tickling her skin where her tunic has come open. She runs her fingers into his hair, stroking through the thin, dark strands that are longer than she remembers. It’s been a few days since he’s washed, she can tell, but she hasn’t either and they’re both cleaner now than they used to be on the road.

He must be nearly two-and-twenty, she thinks, though she isn’t sure even he knows how old he is. Before, he’d only known he was born in the winter, grew up in spring and summer. He’s a man grown now, older than Robb or Bran ever got to be. He’s surely lain with women before—he must have. She recalls the way the Red Witch looked at him, touched his chin and his face as if he were hers to do with as she pleased. And if not her, then some tavern wench, falling easily for a face like his, chiseled and young and smooth.

“Hmph,” he breathes, exhaling on a cross between a grunt and a sigh, warm and rough from sleep. “You’re comfy.”

She laughs, deep and throaty, watching amused as her breasts jiggle beneath his face. “Thanks?”

“‘s a compliment,” he assures her, not moving his head but reaching up with one hand to rest it lightly against her nipple, now pebbled and hard against the rough linen of her tunic. “Best sleep I’ve had in years,” and she believes him because he was never very good at lying. 

She keeps her hands in his hair and hums her agreement, feeling him hard and solid against her thigh. She’s never woken up with a man before; not since she was a girl, anyway, and it’s different now. She likes this part. He’s the most relaxed she’s seen him since they were much younger, less tense and content to simply lie there in the darkness. Since she first saw him again, he’s been on his guard, keeping a noticeable distance between himself and those around him. She and Gib were the only ones he’d let within arm’s reach, and then, only she’d been allowed to touch him at all, after that initial disastrous hug where she’d ended up on the ground. He’s certainly comfortable with her now.

“Feeling better?” he asks. The hand that isn’t on her breast reaches up and tugs on a few locks of her hair. She feels herself arch against him before she can stop it.

He raises his head to peer up at her. “You like that?”

“What do you think?” she says and pulls her thigh up to rub against his cock, knowing better and doing it anyway. He startles, hands coming down on the bunk beneath them, bracing himself above her as he holds himself very still. His eyes are blue and dark, gazing at her with something in his eyes, almost familiar but completely beyond her grasp. It might be hate and it might be longing. 

“Don’t toy with me,” he says in a voice that reminds her of Nymeria, a low, fierce growl, words barely distinguishable. She’s never heard him speak so harshly, not a playful anger, or a frustrated one, but a deep, raging fury that threatens violence. She isn’t afraid of him; there’s a dagger tucked in at the head of the bunk and she can hold her own even against someone as strong as Gendry, but she doesn’t want to hurt him, doesn’t want to lose him as part of her dwindling pack. 

“What makes you think I’m toying with you?” she wants to know. Hadn’t she said she wouldn’t hurt him? It irks her to trust someone who doesn’t trust her back. He used to know her, know how to deal with her and when to push or pull. He’s lost that and she blames the world, the Red Witch, and Gendry himself for being an idiot. 

He scoffs, as if the question is absurd. His manner is cruel, not teasing or gentle like she’s used to. She’s tempted to shove him away and be done with the whole mess, go back to being on her own, but it’s too late for that. In sleep she runs with a pack, and waking alone nearly breaks her each time.

She’s let him in now, and to lose him again would be to fail. If she can’t succeed at keeping her pack—small as it is—together, what hope is there for reuniting the others? Taking back Winterfell and striking down all their enemies, who only seem to grow in number? She can’t lose him again. Not now. Failure means defeat and she won’t have either.

“You’re a highborn,” he says, as if that explains everything. “You don’t act like one but you are. You’re a lord’s daughter and I’m a bastard.”

“I’m a dead man’s daughter!” She braces herself on her elbows, rising up to get in his face and growl. “What are you afraid of?”

“That I’m a means to an end for you!” he shouts, seemingly surprised by his own words and vehemence. Backing away, he sits back on his heels, watching her with a pained look on his face. After a moment he shakes his head, bringing his fist to rest against his forehead. “I’m sorry. I know you’re not like them. You’re different. I know that.”

Arya tries very hard not to kick him. He’d managed to ruin a pleasant morning with his stupidity, and she doesn’t like the implications of his reaction. The moment she touches his cock, he’s reminded of whatever happened to him with the Red Witch and she’s heard enough of that woman to know it’s a tale she won’t like.

“Stupid,” she settles for insulting him instead of hitting him. “What did she do?”

“Who?” he asks, looking up to meet her gaze. He knows what she’s asking and knows that she knows.

She ignores the tumult in her stomach that has nothing to do with seasickness.

“What were you doing in Braavos?” he asks instead of answering, when it’s clear she won’t back down. 

There’s an unspoken agreement in their ensuing silence to accept that answers are not be had today. She’s not ready for him to know what she’s done; she wonders if she’s not, in her own way, far too much like the woman he fears. It’s not shame she feels, not exactly, but instead a hesitancy she can’t explain. She’s done what was needed to survive but she’s less the girl he knew than he thinks. 

If he finds out, will he leave?

\----------------

The wind at midday picks up in great gusts of icy air, filling the sails of The Dancing Maiden at haphazard angles, taking the ship back and forth across a narrow swath of sea. Arya’s temper has snapped and frayed, her scowl and tongue lashing out at everyone in her presence and her brow has become permanently furrowed, stuck in an expression of pain and misery. Even Gendry feels his stomach start to roll when the ship begins to undulate side-to-side, slinging his insides back and forth and forward and back all in one movement. The clouds are dark and bright, weighing down the sky and the sea is churning, thrusting them upwards, narrowing the world to a single strip of howling air and thundering waves. It feels like the world is closing in on them. Gendry wants to crawl back to their bunk with Arya and close his eyes until this storm is passed but the sailors keep hollering tasks his way. It keeps his hands busy. 

Everything he touches brings sensation to his palms, the calluses of hardened skin that will never go away and the lines of ash and iron and dirt smudged so far into his skin he could scrub for years and never be rid of it. He wonders how Arya’s hands fare with the work she’s joined in; she heaves ropes and lugs buckets with the rest of them, steady on her feet but irritable and prone to pauses where she holds her head and growls at her own inability to overcome seasickness.

It’s so easy sometimes to forget that she’s a lady. The years since her father’s death could not have been suited to her heritage but it’s in her blood, nobility, and she can’t escape it any more than he can avoid the fat, lazy drunkard in his reflection, the shadow of what he could have been and might yet be. Her experience has been so different from his. He can’t begin to imagine the comforts she grew up with, the people always around to protect and to serve, the food and the feather bed she’d had every day from birth without fail or worry. Now she stands beside him, a thick length of rope pulled taut in her hands, and he thinks on the delicate flesh of a lady’s hands, how easily it will shred against the rough knots. Arya’s hands are gently callused, he knows, as fine and thin as the rest of her, but they are still a lady’s hands, still soft and unused to hard labor. 

It seems a crime to mar them now. Unfortunately, he’s yet to find a person capable of stopping her from doing what she wants.

The storm hits as the sun sinks down over the horizon, falling onto them and collapsing the world in a single space of darkness, wet, and wind. He glances at the captain, then grabs Arya by the scruff of the neck and hauls her below deck before she can muster a protest. She doesn’t struggle much and that tells him all he needs to know about her exhaustion. Her eyes are closed before they’re back to the cabin, and he urges her feet the last few steps to the door, then to the bunk. More than anything, he wants to drop beside her and disappear from the world for awhile but he remembers waking up, yearning to push her back into the bunk and feel her against him in every possible way, writhing underneath him like she does in his dreams. 

He knows she is no maiden and the temptation is nearly unbearable. She wasn’t unwilling that morning. Playful and smiling and warm, pliant beneath him, everything he’d imagined, hoped for, in a woman and best of all, he knew her, cared for her outside of all that. It had been too perfect. He doesn’t get to be a knight; he doesn’t get to rescue the fair maiden, and nothing good is free. It has a cost he just hasn’t found it yet and he’s terrified because this—whatever he has with Arya, friendship or family or something else—is one thing he truly can’t bear to lose. It’s the only thing he has, really. The only thing he’s ever had. This friendship with a young, lonely girl who’s lost so much is the first thing to ever be his; nothing he made in King’s Landing belonged to him, not even his tools, or his clothes, or his meals, or his bedding. All of it paid for by his Master as part of his duty, and that was due not to Gendry but some mysterious benefactor who’d paid his fees as a boy. The bull helm of which he’d been so proud belonged by rights to Master Mott; the metal hadn’t been his to take but he wasn’t leaving King’s Landing without it and he was heading to the wall with criminals anyway. What did stealing matter when his fate had been decided for him? 

But Arya was his. She’d trusted him with her secret, her identity, and led the Gold Cloak’s off his track with her quick thinking. He still doesn’t know what he’d done to deserve her trust and friendship but he’d taken it, nurtured it, taken care of her as best he could and done what little was in his power to ensure she never had reason to doubt him. He’d lost her but she’d found him again anyway. Whatever it is he has with Arya, he’s not going to let go of. 

There’s a scar on his cock he doesn’t want her to see. The delicate flesh there healed but left a mark, faint, a constant reminder and a tangible lesson learned that all things too good to be true aren’t his to have. They cost more than he has to give. 

He is a coward. But he knows his place, and it isn’t in a lady’s bed, nor her bunk, nor her heart. Dreaming of better only hurts that much more when he wakes.

In the night he tosses and turns with the hull, rolling between the door and the edge of Arya’s bunk, bonking his head on each side and certain whatever brains he has left are going to be scrambled beyond all recognition come morning. From the bunk, gentle snores with every other breath let him know that Arya, at least, found sleep. 

She’s a highborn yet somehow she fits better in this world than he does. 

“Get up here you idiot,” she grumbles in her sleep, one eye peeking down at him from where her face is pressed into the thin woolen sheet. She’s not awake as the glaze in her eye attests, but she used to talk in her sleep all the time—names, mostly—so he’s not surprised. He’s on his feet and curling up on the other side of her, his front against her back, before his mind catches up with his body. 

Damn it. Even in her sleep she’s bossing him around and he obeys, as m’lady commands, because he’s afraid of a girl—afraid to disappoint and afraid to piss off.

She’s back to snoring as soon as he touches the bunk, and he admires her ability to sleep despite everything. As a child she’d lay awake deep into the night, and he’d wake every so often to find her clutching her hands about her sword and reciting names with only a few hours til dawn. So much has changed but he’s still completely lost with how to deal with her. By all laws and traditions, he’s to stay far away and avert his eyes, see her safely to her brother and refrain from touching or speaking to her unless necessary. According to Arya herself, none of that applies here. She should be all that he hates, a noble, the symbol of everything cruel and unjust in the word, but she’s defied that too and somehow she’s the only person in the world he cares for. 

He’s a stupid bastard boy in way over his head. The trick is he’s not sure he’d get out if he could. No one made him leave Braavos but himself, and he’s pretty sure only Arya could’ve inspired him to return to Westeros. He hadn’t ever planned to return, but then she was there, and he’d packed his hammer and meager purse of coin.

It had to be an illness of the mind. Nothing else could explain his venturing back to the land where the Red Lady roamed and her fires ruled.

Too late to back out now, and he wouldn’t even if he could. He is seriously going to regret not sleeping when the dawn comes, which it does too soon and just as he finally closes his eyes.

Arya twitches in her sleep when the sailors pass by with a knock on the cabin door to let them know it’s morning. The tiny room has no light of it’s own, no window and only a small candle neither of them has ever bothered to light. They’ve paid their way and are not required to help out on deck but it keeps him busy and he’s never liked being idle so they’ve included him in their rotating crew.

He should get up and join them but he’s comfortable and exhausted and half hard as he’d been on and off all night. Arya’s snuggled back into him, her arms and shoulders curled around his arm and her head tucked down to rest against his bicep. Her hair’s come out of its braid, sprawling across his shoulder and tickling his nose. He’s warm and even the thought of the endless, oppressive, thrashing water on the other side of the wooden boards at his back doesn’t terrify him so much.

He’s too busy basking in the moment to realize her snores have faded out. 

“Are you going to stay this time?” she asks, quietly, her voice and her eyes still half asleep. It’s the same voice of the girl in the cave years ago, when he told her he was leaving her, a young wolf cub far from home and longing for family. He’d known she was upset at the time but he’d never imagined his staying behind with the Brotherhood might have actually hurt her. She hadn’t seemed vulnerable to anything back then, though he knows she was just a little girl. And he’d been just a boy who’d never had any real friends or family, who’d never considered that his actions could leave a lasting mark on another. That something he’d done could hurt her, scruffy little Arya who seemed impervious to everything.

“I’ll stay as long as you want me to,” he says, and means it.


	4. I just want my innocence back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long hiatus. I've been working on my master's thesis and I'd had just about all I could handle of anything remotely medieval related. At long last, here's the new chapter. Thank you for all your kudos and comments and for your patience!

The Dancing Maiden arrives in White Harbor a week after leaving Braavos, having spent several days blowing to and fro just off shore, unable to catch a favorable wind. Arya finds her sea legs only the day before they set the sails for land, local harbormaster coming on board to bring them safely to dock. The first steps she takes on solid ground are unsteady and her mind is telling her that the world around her is still rocking, tilting, shifting like the deck of the boat. Gendry strolls off the gangway next to the sailors, stable and unaffected by the transition, looking back at her as she presses her eyes closed and growls at herself. She hasn’t been this frustrated with her own body and its limitations since she had her first moon’s blood on the King’s Road with only a handful of scruffy boys for company.

Wolves aren’t meant for the sea but winter is another story. White Harbor lives up to its name, covered in a thick blanket of ice and snow, a continuous drift of flakes pelting her cheeks and a brisk, frozen air filling her lungs, colder than she remembers but home all the same. Her breath comes in thick fogs that whisk around her head, and she sees Gendry out of the corner of her eye blowing little clouds from his mouth and trying to catch them with a big, dark hand—so dark against the northern pale that’s settled over everything. 

It’s his first experience with winter weather, but she remembers summer days with her brothers in Winterfell’s inner courtyard, their laughs and playful goading like a foreign language in her memories, as they tackled one another into mounds of freshly fallen snow. Summer snows were frequent in her childhood; the night would fall under cover of gray clouds as far as the eye could see, and throughout the darkness, white flurries would dance and dance and coat the ground and the trees and the towers. She used to wake in the night just to sit by the window and watch a familiar world turn into something new, something exciting. It would melt by the next afternoon but she’d always evade the septa that morning and spend the hours outside, determined to trample every inch of the pristine white snow. 

“Seven hells!” Gendry cries, stomping his feet and holding his hands to his ears. His face is scrunched and his cheeks are bright red, and snowflakes collect in his hair, pure white against the dark. “It’s fucking cold!”

“It’s winter,” she says, feeling like her father is looking over her shoulder, hand on top of her head as he urges her to get along with her sister. She can almost hear the howling of wolves, echoing in her ears. “Welcome to the North.”

“I can’t feel my feet and I’ve barely been standing here a full minute,” he says, puffing warm air into his hands and clutching them to his ears, then his nose, then back to his ears. 

“We’re not dressed for it,” she tells him, poking at his cloak of unlined summer wool. “I bet you’ve the same on your feet. And those boots aren’t lined. They’re barely leather. We’ll resupply here; it will help.”

“Well excuse me, m’lady. We can’t all afford furs and lined cloaks,” Gendry says. She knows immediately she’s said something wrong because his face is dark and pinched like the old king’s when he’d throw his tantrums. He jabs a finger in the air toward his boots, wielding it like clumsy weapon. “And these boots have served me just fine from Dragonstone to Braavos. How do you suppose we’re going to pay for these new lavish garments?”

“I’m impressed you know what ‘garment’ means,” she mutters, because it’s the first thing that comes to mind and it’s safe. She didn’t mean any insult but she’s never had the greatest of temperaments and she hates above all being caught without answer to his question. It’s true she hadn’t thought of the ‘hows’.

“I’ll think of something,” she says, glaring at him and stalking toward the small town. He follows mostly silent (she hears a few low growls he probably didn’t intend for her to hear) as she heads to the center of town, a crossroads of narrow, winding streets bordered on both sides by covered walkways—the arcades, a particularity known only in White Harbor, built to protect against the often tumultuous weather on the coast. 

It’s her first time in the town as much as it is Gendry’s but all northern cities are built on the same plan: a central covered marketplace surrounded by an inn and prominent local commerces with their windows onto the street for selling. She recognizes the towering dome of a sept not far off, which is rare but not unheard of, as the city serves as a crossroads between northern and southern trade.

“I thought your brother was here,” Gendry says, a distinct tremble in his voice from the cold. 

“Last time I saw him, he was three years old. He’d barely started talking before we left for King’s Landing. Rumor has it he’s here somewhere but I don’t know that I even would recognize him if I saw him,” she says. She can feel his eyes on the back of her and resists the urge to rub the back of her head where she knows his gaze falls.

“I don’t know enough to make a move,” she continues, “For now we lay low, keep our ears and eyes open.”

He nods and follows along, a burly shadow as she sets about getting them a room and meal at the inn. When she asks for one room, he moves forward to protest until she steps on his foot and presses her weight down on the tips of his toes. He clenches his jaw but doesn’t speak, raising a hand to rest on the back of her head. As she negotiates a price and digs around for the coins in her purse, his fingers tangle in her hair, twirling among the locks that had come loose from her braid. He waits until she’s handing over two heavily tarnished silver coins to tug, pulling the hair he’s got clutched in his fingers until pain shoots through her scalp and she feels it all the way down to her toes. 

“Ugh,” she grunts and kicks him in the shin. It doesn’t stop the tingling at the back of her neck, the sting on her head or the warmth between her thighs but it’s satisfying in its own way to feel her foot collide with the sturdy lump of a man behind her.

The innkeeper eyes them both with his one good eye, the other cloudy with age and staring past them at nothing. He doesn’t say anything else, just motions them over to a long, empty table lit by two meager candles and an immense hearth taking up the entirety of the far wall. A young, wiry boy and girl arrive bearing mugs of ale and bowls of simple broth, and Arya can’t remember the last time she ate such typical northern food. The broth isn’t thick or particularly tasty but it sits well in her stomach and the ale is dark, warm, and so unlike the cool brews of Braavos that it’s as if for a moment she’s back in her father’s hall, stealing sips from Robb’s cup and tossing broth-soaked bread at Sansa’s face.

Neither of them attempts conversation in such cramped quarters with the innkeeper and—Arya assumes—his children. They have nothing to say. They are neither home nor safe but sitting beside Gendry by the warmth of a roaring fire feels like the closest she’ll ever get. For the first time in years, she knows who she is and she carries a name she didn’t choose for herself. That feels significant, somehow.

That night finds them squashed side by side in a narrow mattress stuffed with dirt, both of them clutching the tightly-woven wool blanket in icy, trembling fingers. The rooms of the inn are underground to insulate from the cold but without furs, the winter night is inescapable. It’s been a hard few years for the commerces of White Harbor, the innkeeper explained as he handed them the blanket and showed them to a dark, unlit room. They’re the first guests in weeks and there’s no spare furs to be had, nor has their room been warmed by a fire for more than the few minutes they’d been occupying it. Even their body heat seemed useless as the barriers of still-icy small-clothes sucked up any warmth they produced. 

“Your modesty is going to kill us both,” Arya grumbles, burrowing deeper into the mattress which, though lumpy, retains some heat.

His voice is hoarse with cold and something else, “What are you talking about?”

She studies him from the corner of her eye then makes a decision, turning onto her side so she’s facing him, and pokes him until he does the same. “Do you trust me?” she asks once his eyes have met hers.

There’s a tense pause but he nods, and adds, “Yes.”

“Good. Then take off your clothes,” she tells him, sitting up, shivering, as she pulls off her tunic and the thin layer of wool that encases her legs. She leaves her stockings on. When Gendry lays there gaping at her, she shoves him and says, “Hurry up. We’re losing heat.”

Gendry follows suit, speeding up once he wrestles his tunic off and the cold air hits his chest. His breeches get tangled in his legs and he kicks them away, diving back under the blanket and folding in on himself. 

“How is less clothing supposed to keep us warm?” he wants to know. His shivering has doubled from the brief exposure to the outer air and Arya’s not any warmer herself. Of course, it’s hard for them to warm each other when he’s keeping as much space between them as possible, not even letting his feet venture on her side of the bed. 

She knows she has to be the one to move because he won’t so she scoots over, pressing her front against his and wrapping her arms around him to hold him still when he tenses. Her legs nudge between his and she feels the soft skin of his cock where it settles against her hip, half-hard. It’s not a new feeling, exactly, but the knowledge that this is Gendry—the stupid bull she’s known since childhood, who suffered through Harrenhal beside her, wrestled with her in the dirt, slept by her side when she was just a girl, and stupidly stood in front of her when she was threatened—makes her feel awkward and fluttery and hyperaware of every part of them that touches.

“Like this,” she says. He’s warm and solid in her arms, and she nuzzles her nose in his chest, feeling the heat pass between them and the goosebumps of pleasure, not chill, spread across her skin.

“Oh,” he breathes, “That’s how. ”

Heat builds quickly, at least where they’re pressed together. Arya tries to ignore a stubborn chill that clings to her back but it’s no use, and she gives in to the urge to wriggle, twisting them both up in the blanket so no air rests inside their blanket. Gendry makes a strange noise in the back of his throat, like he’s being strangled even though she knows he isn’t, and closes his eyes as she feels the pulsing of blood rushing down to his cock. It’s nestled between the flesh of her hip and his, warm and heavy and thick. She’s no blushing maiden but this, this holding still, wrapped together is new, strangely intimate, and though desire curls through her belly, she isn’t hurried or frantic or desperate as she usually associates with the sensation. It’s a slow-burning desire, a wanting so deep she feels it all over, to the tips of her tingling fingers to the strands of her hair that splay about them both.

“I’m sorry,” his whisper brushes the top of her head.

She furrows her brow and looks up at him, “What for?” she asks but the blush that flares across his face gives her the answer and he shifts against her, his erection no longer only half-hard.

“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “At least we’re warm now.”

He laughs a little—a low, husky sound she’s never heard him make. When he speaks, his voice is rough like the growl that used to rumble through Nymeria’s chest, “I can never figure you out. I know in my head you’re a highborn, but you’re nothing like any of them.”

She thinks about all the people she’s known: the good, the bad, the naive, the innocent, the duplicitous. “We’re the same as you,” she tells him, pushing a finger into the skin on his chest and watching the indent, feeling the flutter of the blood within his veins. “Take away our swords and our furs and our silks and our titles and we’re no different. We bleed, we fuck, we hate our enemies, we love our families. You’d have seen, if you’d ever met Robb or Bran or my father. They were good, and honorable, and they valued a man for his abilities, not his name or whether or not his mother had worn a husband’s cloak before he was conceived.”

“I did meet your father, once,” he says, smoothing a hand down her hair. “He was a good man. But he’d have cut off my cock—and my head—if he’d found me like this, with you.”

She grins and nods, amused at the lingering fear on his face, "If my brothers didn't get to you first," she tells him and watches as he pales around his blush. In her mind, she imagines the reactions Robb and Jon and her father would have to seeing her, unmarried, in bed with a strange man, both bare and entwined. It's hard to picture their faces, because it's been so long and while she'd made them mad plenty of times, she'd never really disappointed them. They never worried she'd wind up with boys in her bed before she was married. She thinks they were more concerned with eventually having to force her to take a husband. 

If her father had lived, she would likely be a wife by now, she thinks, and it's an odd concept. At the very least, an arrangement would have been made and she’d have been rebelling, thrashing, raging uselessly against the walls of her own home. It’s hard to think of the girl she’d been, wild and reckless and so naive. She’d thought men like Jory and her father were invincible, that the world was theirs to command. 

Turns out they were as helpless and vulnerable as anyone.

“I’m not that girl anymore,” she says, half to Gendry and half to herself. “If my father were alive, I’d be on a featherbed—tucked in a castle, wearing dresses, betrothed to some snotty high lord, learning to embroider and bear children and manage a holdfast. I’d have been so unhappy. I would do anything to have my family back, anything. But I’d have been miserable in that life.”

“Hard to imagine being miserable with a loving family, a full belly, and a warm featherbed,” Gendry tells her.

“If I had those things now, I can’t see how I’d ever want for anything else,” she says honestly, remembering the sounds of the Great Hall filled with her family and her father’s household, the smells of warm fresh bread and a full pig roast. Fresh greens and cheeses and cured ham, soft furs and fine wools, the heated walls of Winterfell—it’s a dream she’s almost forgotten. “But I’d never have known any different. I wouldn’t know how bad things can really get. I wouldn’t know that things can get so horrible you wish for all the things you hate, if only to have some of the things you love as well.”

She turns her attention back to the real world, the solid man laying against her and his clear, blue eyes, pale and beautiful like the sea on the coast of Braavos. Dwelling on the past has never gotten her anywhere but homesick. “It doesn’t matter what my father or brothers or anyone would think. I’ve done a lot they wouldn’t approve of and I did it because I had to in order to survive. I don’t regret it. I make my own decisions and I’ll never be the highborn lady I was born to. But it’s the middle of winter and we’re freezing down here and can keep each other warm. I trust you not to do anything I don’t want you to.”

He gazes at her and his lips curve upward, just a little, as he shakes his head. “You mean you trust you can kill me without much trouble if I do.”

It’s meant to be lighthearted and she wants to laugh, but she’s exhausted. She’s so tired of everything; of feeling so much all the time, of having so many thoughts in her head, of being powerless in what has befallen her family and her home. The effort it takes to just to keep moving each day.

“No,” she says, not bothering to match his smile. She’s tired and she’s not in the mood for bravado, false modesty, or diversion. She’s realizing the main thing she learned at the House of Black and White was to lie; not to others, but to herself. “I trust you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

He says nothing to that, laying on his side and gazing at her with that same pained look on his face she remembers from childhood. His thinking face, the one that—now that she thinks about it—has always sort of reminded her of the old king only she hadn’t been able to place the familiarity before. It’s eery, she thinks, to see the ghost of the one whose death started all this mess years ago, to see Gendry’s own past written across his face before he’d even known what to look for. It’s strange to think on the fat old man whose laugh is pretty much the only thing she remembers, and on her father, and all of the people who couldn’t have known what would come of their actions.

“You’re the only one who fought for me,” he says, breaking the silence and she honestly can’t figure out what he’s talking about until he continues. Her thoughts are all over the place but apparently so are his. “No one gave a damn when Master Mott sold me to the Watch, and none of the Brotherhood cared when she came to take me away but you did. I know you were mad at me for choosing to stay behind, but you still kicked and fought and screamed at them when they traded me off for a handful of gold. I never got to say thank you. I was too stupid to see what they wanted me for but you knew. You screamed ‘You’re going to hurt him,’ and I didn’t know if it was true or not. I didn’t fight hard enough, but you were right. You were right.” He swallows several times, like he wants to say more but can’t, and she wants to tell him to stop, that none of it matters anymore. She’s been so many people since then, she’s not sure she’s even at all the girl he thinks he’s talking to but she can’t bring herself to disappoint him. For some reason what he thinks of her matters, in a way she isn’t used to, and to admit to him what she’s been, how she’s changed, seems like an impossible task when all she can imagine is the distrust in his eyes, the sadness that would come when he learned the truth. 

With him looking at her now, eyes sincere, warm, and so very blue, she wants more than anything to be that girl he remembers. To be Arya Stark, whoever she is. Whoever she should have been.

“You’re my pack,” she tells him because it’s true, and it was true even when she’d forgotten her own name and only dreams remained. “The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. Because we protect each other.”

He smiles at her, somewhat timidly, and she can’t help what she says next, “I’ll kill her for what she did to you. She may be powerful and a witch, but I am no longer a helpless little girl. I serve the God of Death and in the end, he is the only god who counts.”

Slowly, hesitantly, he opens his mouth and tells her of his time in Dragonstone. The lavish welcoming, the food and the wine and the revelation of his paternity. His voice gets nearly soundless as he tells of the Red Woman and her games, the humiliation, and the pain—she doesn’t hear the words so much as feels them in his breath and sees them in the shapes of his lips that are dry and cracked in the corners. Forget knives and swords—she wants to claw out the eyes of the red-headed witch and her pet king, Gendry’s own uncle, who made him a sacrifice in their game.

No one hurts what's hers, not anymore. 

Where he was smiling and earnest before his confession, now his eyes are dark and the twist in his mouth is bitter, not shy or pleased. He looks ashamed, like he’s embarrassed for briefly believing in a dream offered to him by a beautiful woman, for not remembering his place. His normally warm eyes are hard and cold, empty like her own, and she can’t stand the sight, so she leans forward and presses her lips to his. They part immediately under hers in surprise, and she teases first the top, then the bottom lip, wiggling her hips so she slides under him and pulling him around so he lays on top, warm and solid and heavy. She can feel the indecision in his body, the slight flailing of his arms as he tries to figure out what to do, whether to resist and pull away, or the leg that settles in between her own, whether to give in and let go. He moves with her reflexively, lips following and reciprocating, even as the tension in his shoulders mounts and the muscles knot.

With a jerk, he pulls his head back, breathing heavy, “Arya,” he says, and she hears the torment, the desire and the reluctance all in the sound of her name.

“You’re my pack,” she tells him, unsure what exactly she’s trying to say but knowing that he needs to hear it. Instead of waiting for him to make a decision, she leans up and takes his bottom lip in her teeth, drawing him back down to her and marking her territory. One of her legs wraps itself around his hips and holds him tight.

This seems to be all it takes because he melts against her, his body covering every part of her and spilling out over her sides, curling around her, settling into her every dip and curve. He is heavy and hot, and the threat of freezing that loomed over them only moments before seems absurd as heat washes over her. His touch is no longer hesitant: his hands grip her sides, fingers trailing along the dips and lines of her ribs, burning a path along her skin with his fingertips. 

The world narrows and sharpens, becoming just them, their breaths, the small space under the blanket where the cold, the winter, and the war are far away. His lips and hands are as rough as the first boy’s had been but there’s something different about it being Gendry, somehow each touch is weighted with all that’s passed between them. She isn’t just seeking her own pleasure, she wants it for the both of them, she wants it to last, wants the process, not just the finish. 

His hands roam uncertainly, caressing in broad strokes as if he’s unsure where best to go. She takes his hand and guides him, laughing out loud when he brushes her ribs too lightly and it tickles. This is the first time she’s been with someone she knows, someone she cares about, and she nuzzles her nose in the crook where his neck meets his head, just behind his ear, where the scent of him is strongest. He smells of Gendry, unwashed and male, with the salt and tar from the voyage and she gives a feral grin, stroking the skin with her teeth. His answering groan fills her with a heat the likes she’s never known, and she rears up, takes his lips with hers, pulling him tight against her, flesh to flesh. 

When she finally angles her hips and brings him inside, he lifts himself up, bracing his arms on either side of her head and holds her eyes in his. They are darker than she’s ever seen them, almost black with the pupils blown wide. His breaths come fast and shuddering, eyes hazy and jaw loose with pleasure. With her guidance, he finds the spot that makes her thrash and tremble, and keeps their gazes locked until he comes, burying his face in her chest and pressing inside her as far as he can while he shakes and tries to hold himself to earth. 

She holds him pressed against her as his fingers finish her off, and she’s never felt anything as good, not by herself and not with others. But it is his shadowed face above her own that she will remember until the end of her days. 

She thinks that somehow, finally, there might be more to life than death.


End file.
